The attack on the Forth saw the royal navy moving to defend Scotland but it was Scots being moved to defend the royal navy at Chatham which caught the imagination. A heroic but doomed attempt to disentangle Royal Oak from a Dutch fireship earned Captain Archibald Douglas of the Royal Scots Guards a poem from Andrew Marvell. Titled ‘The Loyal Scot’, this was a paean to union, which flared briefly into life as a political ambition in 1670. It also praised monarchy as the glue holding the nations together and, in the end, the personal union remained. It was to be the other theme of the poem, Scottish soldiers and English ships, which would be the keynotes of the Anglo-Scottish security relationship of the Restoration years. The two played complementary roles in what could be described as a union of arms, albeit an informal one.

The British Image of the Navy

Another Marvell poem gives a reflection on the ties between ideas of Britain, the navy, and the monarchy while describing the first rate Royal Charles:

The associations are rarely so clearly presented in such a triptych. The dynasty was becoming less Scottish, and less motivated to encourage a broader notion of Britishness, but the navy was something of an exception to this trend. Charles II was the first Stuart not to have been born in Scotland, and his formative experience of Scotland with, as the popular engraving had it, his nose to the Covenanter grindstone had not endeared his northern kingdom to him. There were no Scots holding court offices and the thistles of Scottish iconography withered. The gradual alienation of the dynasty from their native land after moving to the wealthier kingdom had a sense of inevitability to it and was reflected in other examples of composite monarchies.

In the naval context this was offset by Charles's passion for his fleet, where British iconography flourished, which, when combined with the integration of the levy and convoy, meant that the locus of regal union shifted from the court to the royal navy, or more broadly a British security architecture.